Poor Elijah’s Almanack: All is not lost — yet

By
Peter Berger, Register Citizen

Monday, June 16, 2014

Every June Poor Elijah accepts that the President and Oprah have garnered all the commencement invitations. Fortunately, nothing exciting ever happens on my porch, so he always has a venue for his annual address.

Pour yourself some iced coffee and settle in.

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The President says “education is everything to our children’s future.” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan agrees I’m doing “the most important work in the country.” Apparently, though, I’m not doing it very well. I know this because Mr. Duncan also says I’m part of a “school to prison pipeline.” He further claims a “staggering” forty percent of college freshmen require remediation, even in Massachusetts, which ranks first in achievement nationwide.

Inconveniently, his forty percent figure was roughly double the actual number. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number crunchers in Mr. Duncan’s education department, the average percentage for all fifty states is closer to twenty percent.

I mention this because Mr. Duncan, like most policymakers, is adamant that data should drive education reform. It’s bad enough that most education data is meaningless, unreliable, and expensive. It’s even more unnerving when experts who zealously judge and “transform” schools according to data can’t even get their faulty data right.

Of course, at the same time Mr. Duncan complains that too many students graduate unprepared for college, he also maintains that most students drop out of school “not because it’s too hard, but because it’s too easy.”

In other words, students who complete high school don’t know enough, but students who don’t complete high school drop out because learning all the things they don’t know would have been too easy.

Most dropouts weren’t getting A’s. They were failing the “easy” classes Mr. Duncan condemns. Making those classes more academically difficult might be a good idea, but it’s unlikely to result in fewer students dropping out.

Students who aren’t meeting allegedly low standards aren’t likely to succeed if you make the standards higher. If I can’t vault over a three-foot bar, setting the bar at six feet probably won’t help. Therein lies the flaw in most reform schemes, including reform’s current flavor, the Common Core.

Welcome to the looking glass world in which my “important work” takes place.

Mr. Duncan and the plague of experts like him who don’t know the first thing about teaching are problematic. Forty years of education reform, premised on pipedreams, have been counterproductive. Some teachers are incompetent and should be dismissed. But none of these is education’s most pernicious menace.

Over the years I’ve known many students and their parents. Most have been decent, hard-working people with ordinary human blind spots and flaws, liable to intemperate moments, but generally reasonable.

Some have not been so.

This is to be expected.

What’s unexpected and ill-advised is how we deal with these aberrant individuals.

Individuals who harm other students, threaten them, or disrupt their education should be excluded from school. I don’t care what the Attorney General and Mr. Duncan say. They don’t live every day in a classroom. Their glib platitudes about safe schools and the “learning process” ring as hollow as Marie Antoinette’s suggestion that the peasants eat cake.

I don’t know that I could bear what some of my students do. I cut them some slack when I can. But in the end I’m more obliged to care about the rights of the students they terrorize and whose educations they steal. Education may be a right, but it’s a right that can be lost, like the right of drunks to drive and the right of criminals to roam freely in society.

If we don’t stand united against violence and disruption, don’t come to me about why my students don’t learn.

Students aren’t failing because the material is too easy or too boring. Some things have always been boring. That formerly didn’t stop Americans from learning them.

Learning isn’t always fun, and the harder it gets, the less fun it becomes. That’s why three-year-olds don’t feel the burden of work as much as thirty-year-olds do. Life isn’t an arcade. The fact that so many policymakers think that’s what school should be helps explain why our nation is growing less productive and competitive.

Students don’t need to learn because it’s fun or even interesting, or because it gratifies their immediate appetites. They need to learn because if they don’t, no one will, and that will mean an end to American life as they know it. If that’s not enough motivation, I don’t have anything better.

If we can’t impress that imperative on our children, don’t come to me about why my students don’t learn.

Families increasingly expect schools to feed their children, exercise their children, treat their illnesses, teach them values, prevent their pregnancies, and generally fill in as parents.

Parents increasingly come to school demanding, “What are you going to do to solve my child’s problem.” Irrational demands, obscenities, and intimidation are daily fare for too many teachers and principals.

If we don’t stand united against the most irresponsible among us, don’t come to me about why my students don’t learn.

All is not lost yet. It’s important that you as this year’s graduates understand that.

More than my words can say rides on your understanding.

Godspeed.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.